The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

INTRODUCTION

EVANGELICALS,

THE GOSPEL,

AND THE TRINITY

(Or, How the Trinity Changed Everything for

Evangelicalism and Can Do It Again)

I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it. . . . Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father.

1 JOHN 2:21–24

The religious terrain is full of the graves of good words which have died from lack of care . . . and these good words are still dying all around us.There is that good word Evangelical.It is certainly moribund, if not already dead. Nobody any longer seems to know what it means.

B. B. WARFIELD (1916)

The doctrine of the Trinity has a peculiar place in the minds and hearts of evangelical Christians. We tend to acknowledge the doctrine with a polite hospitality but not welcome it with any special warmth. This book shows why we ought to embrace the doctrine of the Trinity wholeheartedly and without reserve, as a central concern of evangelical Christianity.

How has it come about that so many evangelicals today are cold toward the doctrine of the Trinity, confused about its meaning, or noncommittal about its importance? Even though solid biblical and theological teaching on the subject is available, the doctrine of the Trinity continues to be treated as an awkward guest in the evangelical household. The very terminology of Trinitarianism sounds vaguely Roman Catholic to our ears: isn’t Trinity, after all, a Latin word not found in the Bible but devised sometime in the Dark Ages? And though it was assembled (so the story goes) by clever theologians rather than apostles, isn’t it of dubious status as a specimen of logic? Above all, isn’t it a speculative distraction from the serious business of the gospel?

Doubts like these are hardly dispelled by the haunting thought that it is mandatory for Christians to believe it at peril of damnation. Perhaps you have heard the frightful admonition:

The

Trinity:

Try to understand it

and you’ll lose your mind;

try to deny it and you’ll lose your soul!¹

Heavy-handed theological pressure like that is about as helpful, in the long run, as tying shoelaces tighter to make up for a bad-fitting shoe. Wherever this pressure is felt, it turns us from negligent Trinity-ignorers to motivated Trinity-phobes. If we know nothing else about the Trinity, we at least know that explicitly denying it will put a church on the list of non-Christian cults. To many evangelicals, the stakes of thinking about the Trinity seem too high and the payoff too low—and we are not gamblers. No wonder the word Trinitarian is conspicuously absent from the list of adjectives that leap to mind to describe the theological character of evangelicalism. No wonder many of our congregations drift from year to year with only the vaguest apprehension of the fact that their Christian life is one of communion with the Father in the Son and Spirit. No wonder we have become so alienated from the roots of our existence as evangelicals: our Trinitarian roots.

TRINITARIAN DEEP DOWN

Evangelicals do have Trinitarian roots, after all, and those roots reach deep; not just into the history of the movement but into the reality of who we are in Christ. Deep down it is evangelical Christians who most clearly witness to the fact that the personal salvation we experience is reconciliation with God the Father, carried out through God the Son, in the power of God the Holy Spirit. As a result, evangelical Christians have been in reality the most thoroughly Trinitarian Christians in the history of the church. This is a strong claim and one not often heard these days, but I hope to make good on it in the course of this book. The characteristic beliefs, commitments, practices, and presuppositions of evangelicalism were all generated by a spiritual revolution: an applied Trinitarian theology which took more seriously than ever before in Christian history the involvement of Father, Son, and Spirit in the Christian life.

Nothing we do as evangelicals makes sense if it is divorced from a strong experiential and doctrinal grasp of the coordinated work of Jesus and the Spirit, worked out against the horizon of the Father’s love. Personal evangelism, conversational prayer, devotional Bible study, authoritative preaching, world missions, and assurance of salvation all presuppose that life in the gospel is life in communion with the Trinity. Forget the Trinity and you forget why we do what we do; you forget who we are as gospel Christians; you forget how we got to be like we are.

The central argument of this book is that the doctrine of the Trinity inherently belongs to the gospel itself. It is not merely the case that this is a doctrine that wise minds have recognized as necessary for defense of the gospel,² or that a process of logical deduction leads from believing the gospel to affirming the doctrine of the Trinity, or that people who believe the gospel should also believe whatever the God of the gospel reveals about himself. No, while all those statements are true, they do not say enough, because there is a Trinity-gospel connection much more intimate than those loose links suggest. Trinity and gospel are not just bundled together so that you can’t have one without the other. They are internally configured toward each other. Even at risk of being misunderstood before the full argument emerges in later chapters, let me say it as concisely as possible: the gospel is Trinitarian, and the Trinity is the gospel.³ Christian salvation comes from the Trinity, happens through the Trinity, and brings us home to the Trinity.

Because the gospel is Trinitarian, evangelicals as gospel people are by definition Trinity people, whether or not they think so. It only makes sense that if the gospel is inherently Trinitarian, the most consistently and self-consciously Trinitarian movement of Christians would be the movement that has named itself after the gospel, the evangel: evangelicalism. This is not the conventional wisdom we usually hear. We are more likely to hear the kind of lament this introduction began with, the lament that evangelicals have at best a precarious and tentative grip on the Trinity. But the lamentations and warnings derive their force from the fact that our recent poor performance as Trinitarians stands in such stark contradiction to our actual existence as Christians who are in fellowship with the Trinity. Evangelicals are too Trinitarian to be so un-Trinitarian!

Although not everybody knows that evangelicals are Trinitarian deep down, it has not been a complete secret. One of the theologians who has, in recent decades, most faithfully and articulately insisted on the essentially Trinitarian character of evangelicalism is Gerald Bray, who says that the belief that a Christian is seated in heavenly places with Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:6), sharing with Him in the inner life of the Godhead, is the distinctive teaching of Evangelical Christianity. No matter how much the doctrine may have become nonfunctional in the self-understanding of contemporary evangelicals, a robustly Trinitarian view of salvation has been the core, the distinctive teaching of the historic evangelical faith, according to Bray. In fact, though we have no grounds to be smug or triumphalist about it, we ought to testify clearly to our distinctively evangelical Trinitarian roots:

Without pride in our own tradition or prejudice against other forms of Christianity, we must surely proclaim that the experience of a personal relationship with God, sealed by the Spirit in the finished work of the Son fromWhom He proceeds, is a deeper and more satisfying faith than any other known to man. . . . Evangelical Protestants are not wrong in insisting that theirs is a deeper, more vital experience of Christ than that enjoyed by Christians of other traditions. We have not received the grace of God in vain and we must not be ashamed to own the Christ we know as the only Lord and Saviour of men.⁴

Bray is a historian of ideas, so he is taking the long view of evangelical history. When he says that evangelical experience is marked by a deeper and more satisfying faith than any other known to man, he is thinking in terms of five centuries of evidence, not the most recent five decades. He is not reporting current events but history; not today’s headlines but the volumes and volumes of spiritual theology that fill well-stocked Protestant bookshelves. Similarly, the argument of this book is that evangelicalism is Trinitarian deep down, even if surface appearances are less promising.

OUR RELATED PROBLEMS: WE ARE SHALLOW AND WEAKLY TRINITARIAN

Anybody who stays on the surface of contemporary evangelical Christianity is unlikely to encounter profound Trinitarianism, either in teaching or in spirituality. Though most of this book will be about what evangelical churches do well, perhaps it’s best to start by admitting two problems that any observer could see. First, evangelicals are not currently famous for their Trinitarian theology. Second, the evangelical movement is bedeviled by a theological and spiritual shallowness.

First there is evangelical coldness toward the Trinity. Above, I said that everything about evangelicalism presupposes that life under the gospel is life in communion with the Trinity, and that if you forget the Trinity, you forget why we do what we do, who we are as gospel Christians, and how we got to be like we are. Forgetfulness on that scale is, however, both possible and widespread. Forgetting where our evangelical commitments and practices originated, our churches are in constant danger of forgetting why we do any of the things we do. Our beliefs and practices all presuppose the Trinity, but that presupposition has for too long been left unexpressed, tacit rather than explicit, and taken for granted rather than celebrated and taught. We have systematic theology books that argue for the fact that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but that fact seems like an item on a list, one of the many affirmations we make when summarizing the Bible. In every area of evangelical existence, our tacit Trinitarianism must be coaxed out, articulated, and confessed. We may be the most consistently Trinitarian Christians in the world, but it does us little good if we continue to be radically Trinitarian without knowing it. We are at risk of denying in our words and actions the reality that our lives are based on. We are at risk of lapsing into sub-Trinitarian practices and beliefs, of behaving as if we serve a merely unipersonal deity rather than the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of the Bible. We are at risk of staying in the shallows when God calls us to the deep things.

This brings us, second, to evangelical shallowness. The evangelical movement is booming, but it often seems to be ten miles wide and half an inch deep. This shallowness is not only how things look from the outside, to the cultured despisers of evangelical religion. It also describes the way many evangelicals feel about their own churches and spiritual lives. Many evangelicals seem haunted by a sense of not being about anything except the moment of conversion. When they stop to ask themselves where they are taking their converts, they fear that when they get there, there will be no there there. When they sense that God is calling them to a deeper communion with him, they are unable to say what that would be. After all, you can’t get any more saved than saved. When serious-minded evangelical Christians feel the desire to go deeper into doctrine or spirituality, they typically turn to any resources except for their own properly evangelical resources. A strange alienation of affections sets in. They cast about for something beyond what they already have, which leads them to look for something beyond the gospel. What sounded like such glad, good news at the outset (free forgiveness in Christ!) begins to sound like elementary lessons that should have been left behind on the way to advanced studies. What they embraced as the sum of wisdom when they first turned to God (cultivate a personal relationship with Jesus by reading your Bible, praying, and going to church) begins to sound like Sunday school answers that never quite address the right questions. What has gone wrong when evangelicalism not only looks shallow from the outside but feels shallow from the inside?

These two problems, our forgetfulness of the Trinity and our feeling of shallowness, are directly related. The solutions to both problems converge in the gospel, the evangel which evangelicalism is named after, and which is always deeper than we can fathom. Our great need is to be led further in to what we already have. The gospel is so deep that it not only meets our deepest needs but comes from God’s deepest self. The salvation proclaimed in the gospel is not some mechanical operation that God took on as a side project. It is a mystery that was kept secret for long ages (Rom. 16:25), a mystery of salvation that goes back into the heart of God, decreed before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4; 1 Pet. 1:20). When God undertook our salvation, he did it in a way that put divine resources into play, resources which involve him personally in the task. The more we explore and understand the depth of God’s commitment to salvation, the more we have to come to grips with the triunity of the one God. The deeper we dig into the gospel, the deeper we go into the mystery of the Trinity. The puritan theologian Thomas Goodwin taught that the proclamation of the gospel was the bringing forth and publishing of a mystery that God had treasured from all eternity and that the things of the gospel are depths—the things of the gospel . . . are the deep things of God.⁵

If the two problems of weak Trinitarianism and shallowness are related, there is also a single solution: we must dig deeper into the gospel itself. Instead of staying on the surface of it, satisfied with its immediate benefits to us and its promises of future blessedness, we can look into the essence of the gospel and find much more contained within it. Inevitably, what we will find in the depths of the good news is the character of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When we call to mind how the gospel is inherently Trinitarian, we will find that we are being called back to the depths of the encounter with God that brought about the movement called evangelicalism. The more deeply Trinitarian we become, the more Trinitarianly deep we become. We are who we are because of the triune God’s work for our salvation, and it is high time for us to grasp this truth more firmly and bind to ourselves the strong name of the Trinity.⁶

EMPHATIC EVANGELICALISM

This chapter opened with the question, How has it come about that so many evangelicals today are cold toward the doctrine of the Trinity, confused about its meaning, or noncommittal about its importance? If evangelicalism is really Trinitarian deep down and came into existence because of a deep encounter with the gospel of the Trinity, its alienation from those Trinitarian roots is especially puzzling. But I think it can be explained by noting one of evangelicalism’s primary characteristics: evangelicalism is emphatic.

Protestant evangelicals stand in a great tradition of Christian faith and doctrine: we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses to the one Lord, one faith, and one baptism—the things that make Christianity Christian. No matter how defective your contemporary evangelical church experience may be, you can start there and pick up a trail to the great, confident evangelicalism of the nineteenth century and follow it back through the Wesleyan revivals and the Puritans, to the Reformation and its grounding in medieval Christendom, and behind that to the first heirs of the apostles, the earliest church fathers. All this is ours. Evangelicalism, in all its denominational manifestations, is an expression of that great tradition, and while it has nothing that is absolutely unique to offer, it does have distinguishing features. Chief among its distinguishing features is that it is emphatic. It has made strategic choices about what should be emphasized when presenting the fullness of the faith.

J. C. Ryle, the Anglican bishop of Liverpool, tried to put his finger on this distinctive trait in a tract called Evangelical Religion. First he presented a list of the various doctrines that characterized the evangelical side of the Anglican tradition: the supremacy of Scripture, the depth of sin, the importance of the work of Christ, and the necessity of both an inward and outward working of the Holy Spirit. But second, he admitted that many Anglicans who were outside the Evangelical body, are sound in the main about the five points I have named, if you take them one by one. What was missing, according to Ryle, was the emphasis:

Propound them separately,as points to be believed,and they would admit them every one. But they do not give them the prominence, position, rank, degree, priority, dignity, and precedence which we do. And this I hold to be a most important difference between us and them. It is the position which we assign to these points, which is one of the grand characteristics of Evangelical theology.We say boldly that they are first, foremost, chief, and principal things in Christianity, and that want of attention to their position mars and spoils the teaching of many well-meaning Churchmen.⁷

Especially in times of religious uncertainty, it is emphasis that makes all the difference. The evangelical laymen who edited The Fundamentals knew this. In the twelfth and final volume of the series, having published eighty-three chapters on important contemporary doctrinal issues by an all-star team of authors, they published an essay by evangelist L. W. Munhall, entitled The Doctrines That Must Be Emphasized in Successful Evangelism.⁸ Munhall’s list was not reductionist. It included the doctrines of sin, redemption, resurrection, justification, regeneration, repentance, conversion, obedience, and assurance. Beyond these ten points of emphasis, Munhall obviously believed a great many other things and was prepared to defend them in feisty style against all opponents. But not everything can be said at once, and Munhall, speaking for those early fundamentalists, knew that the most strategic decision we ever make is the decision of what to emphasize.

Evangelicalism has always been concerned to underline certain elements of the Christian message. We have a lot to say about God’s revelation, but we emphasize the business end of it, where God’s voice is heard normatively: the Bible. We know that everything Jesus did has power for salvation in it, but we emphasize the one event that is literally crucial: the cross. We know that God is at work on his people through the full journey of their lives, from the earliest glimmers of awareness to the ups and downs of the spiritual life, but we emphasize the hinge of all spiritual experience: conversion. We know there are countless benefits that flow from being joined to Christ, but we emphasize the big one: heaven.

Bible, cross, conversion, heaven. These are the right things to emphasize. But in order to emphasize anything, you must presuppose a larger body of truth to select from. For example, the cross of Christ occupies its central role in salvation history precisely because it has Christ’s preexistence, incarnation, and earthly ministry on one side and his resurrection and ascension on the other. Without these, Christ’s work on the cross would not accomplish our salvation. But flanked by them, it is the cross that needs to be the focus of attention in order to explain the gospel. The same could be said for the Bible within the total field of revelation, for conversion within the realm of religious experience, and for heaven as one of the benefits of being in Christ. Each of these is the right strategic emphasis but only stands out properly when it has something to stand out from.

When evangelicalism wanes into an anemic condition, as it sadly has in recent decades, it happens in this way: the points of emphasis are isolated from the main body of Christian truth and handled as if they are the whole story rather than the key points. Instead of teaching the full counsel of God (incarnation, ministry of healing and teaching, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and second coming), anemic evangelicalism simply shouts its one point of emphasis louder and louder (the cross! the cross! the cross!). But in isolation from the total matrix of Christian truth, the cross doesn’t make the right kind of sense. A message about nothing but the cross is not emphatic. It is reductionist. The rest of the matrix matters: the death of Jesus is salvation partly because of the life he lived before it, and certainly because of the new life he lived after it, and above all because of the eternal background in which he is the eternal Son of the eternal Father. You do not need to say all of those things at all times, but you need to have a felt sense of their force behind the things you do say. When that felt sense is not present, or is not somehow communicated to the next generation, emphatic evangelicalism becomes reductionist evangelicalism.

Emphatic evangelicalism can be transformed into reductionist evangelicalism in less than a generation and then become self-perpetuating. People who grow up under the influence of reductionist evangelicalism suffer, understandably, from some pretty perplexing disorientation. They are raised on Bible, cross, conversion, and heaven as the whole Christian message, and they sense that there must be more than that. They catch a glimpse of this more in Scripture but aren’t sure where it belongs. They hear it in the hymns, but it is drowned out by the repetition of the familiar. They find extended discussions of it in older authors, but those very authors also reinforce what they’ve been surrounded by all along: that the most important things in the Christian message are Bible, cross, conversion, and heaven. Inside of reductionist evangelicalism, everything you hear is right, but somehow it comes out all wrong.

That is because when emphatic evangelicalism degenerates into reductionist evangelicalism, it still has the emphasis right but has been reduced to nothing but emphasis. When a message is all emphasis, everything is equally important and you are always shouting. Your powers of attention suffer fatigue from the constant barrage of emphasis. The other problem is that a gospel reduced to four points ceases to make sense unless its broader context can be intuited. The Bible says Jesus died so you can get saved and go to heaven is a good start, the right emphasis, and a recognizable statement of the gospel—provided it is securely lodged in the host of other truths that support and explain it. The comprehensive truth of the Christian message needs to be sharpened by having these points of emphasis drawn out, but these points of emphasis need the comprehensive truth of the Christian message to give them context.

Knowing what to emphasize in order to simplify the Christian message is a great skill. It is not the same thing as rejecting nuances or impatiently waving away all details in order to cut to the main point. There is a kind of anti-intellectualism that is only interested in the bottom line, and considers everything else disposable. Certainly that kind of anti-intellectualism can be found in evangelical history, but it is a deviation from the true ideal. Emphatics are not know-nothings. The emphatic approach to Christian witness has a different impulse. It knows that the only way to emphasize anything is precisely to keep everything else in place, not to strip it away. The most proficient communicators always know that they are leaving something out to make their point more clearly and have a residual awareness of what is being left in the background as they direct attention to the foreground. The whole vast network of interconnected ideas left in shadows in the background is what makes the bright object of our focused attention stand out so strikingly, make so much sense of everything else, and point us to the total truth.

The best evangelical communicators have always been skillful emphasizers. John Wesley, for example, pointed to the sufficiency of Scripture by describing his desire to be homo unius libri, a man of one book⁹—although as an Oxford graduate, the author of dozens of works, and the editor and publisher of a comprehensive Christian Library, he was conspicuously a man of many books. Man of one book was a motto that emphasized Scripture, not a slogan for anti-intellectualism.

The best example of someone who struck the right balance between depth and emphasis is the apostle Paul. When the jailer in Philippi asked him, What must I do to be saved? he did not hem or haw, mumble or ramble. He did not stop to search his memory, pondering which passages of Scripture or trajectories of argument might be relevant to this question. He did not correct the jailer by saying, It would be better if you asked me, ‘What has God done to save me?’ He did not take out a piece of chalk and diagram the history of salvation on the walls of the prison, or talk about predestination, or explore the spiritual dynamics of the jailer’s quest for meaning. He said, Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved (Acts 16:31). On the other hand, when writing to the Ephesian church, to whom he had declared the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27), he did not just keep repeating Believe in the Lord Jesus over and over, as if he had nothing more to say. For them, he described the eternal purposes of God the Father in choosing us to receive redemption through the blood of his beloved Son and to be sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise (Eph. 1:3–14).¹⁰ Paul was hardly a know-nothing, even when he resolved, for strategic reasons, to know nothing in Corinth except Jesus Christ and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2). Paul knew how to be emphatic, but he also knew how to lead believers deeper into the mystery which had been made known to him by revelation (Eph. 3:3). He could make the simple point about salvation in a few words, and he could describe the deep background of that emphatic message in all its features. When he turned to the task of exploring that background, he turned to the doctrine of the Trinity: the Father’s choosing, the Son’s redeeming, and the Spirit’s sealing.

The doctrine of the Trinity is the classic statement of the comprehensive truth of the Christian message. It is a summary doctrine, encompassing the full scope of the biblical revelation. When the early church tried to summarize the main point of the Bible in short creeds (such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed), they inevitably produced three-point outlines about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. When emphatic evangelicalism degenerates into reductionist evangelicalism, it is always because it has lost touch with the all-encompassing truth of its Trinitarian theology. What is needed is not a change of emphasis but a restoration of the background, of the big picture from which the emphasized elements have been selected.

A blade is not all cutting edge. In fact, the cutting edge is the smallest part of the knife. The rest of the knife is the heavy heft of the broad, flat sides and the handle. Considered all by itself, the cutting edge is vanishingly small—a geometric concept instead of a useable object. Isolated from the great storehouse of all Christian truth, reductionist evangelicalism is a vanishingly small thing. It came from emphatic evangelicalism, and it must return to being emphatic evangelicalism or vanish to nothing.

Does the doctrine of the Trinity belong to the cutting edge of emphatic evangelicalism? No, it does not. It constitutes the hefty, solid steel behind the cutting edge. We do not need to use the T-word in evangelism or proclaim everything about the threeness and oneness of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in every sermon. But the Trinity belongs to the necessary presuppositions of the gospel. In this book, we will emphasize the doctrine of the Trinity constantly. It will be the continual focus and the explicit subject of our study as we examine how the Trinity changes everything. We will triple underline it. The reason for doing this lies in our current plight of Trinity forgetfulness. Because current evangelicals have ceased to be aware of the deep Trinitarian background that previous generations of evangelicals presupposed, an extended exercise in calling the Trinity back to remembrance is necessary. But if the exercise is successful, the doctrine of the Trinity can and should subsequently recede from the foreground of our attention, back into the background. When evangelical Christianity is functioning properly, and